Deeplinks Blog posts about Free Speech

The House Judiciary Committee will meet today for a hearing on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). What could have been an opportunity for the committee to hear from a variety of stakeholders has devolved into a parade of pro-SOPA partisans. Scheduled to testify are representatives from the Register of Copyrights, Pfizer Global Security, the Motion Picture Association of America, the AFL-CIO, and Mastercard Worldwide—many of which helped to draft this legislation in the first place, and didn’t let anyone else into the room. The only scheduled witness in opposition to the bill is Katherine Oyama, policy counsel on copyright and trademark law for Google.

Whether you support or oppose the bill, there’s no question that it will affect a broad range of activities, which is one reason we’ve seen an extraordinary outcry of opposition since the bill was introduced.

On the eve of the House Judiciary Committee's hearing on the Stop Internet Piracy Act—where five witnesses will appear in favor of the bill to just one against—a broad group of tech companies, lawmakers, experts, professors, and rights groups have come out against the bill.

The statements, written by people from a variety of backgrounds and political persuasions, incorporate many of the same broad themes: SOPA will threaten perfectly legal websites, stifle innovation, kill jobs, and substantially disrupt the infrastructure of the Internet. Here is a small sample of what they had to say:

A veritable Who's Who of tech giants—including Facebook, Google, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, AOL and Mozilla—explicitly came out against both SOPA and PROTECT-IP in a letter to the ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees:

When Hosni Mubarak was ousted from the Egyptian presidency in February, Egypt's revolutionaries saw a new beginning: an Egypt in which individual rights--including the right to free expression--would be respected. Just nine months later, with several prominent bloggers languishing in prison and countless other civilians tried by military courts for protesting, the future looks bleak.

In terms of numbers, Egypt ranks third--behind only China and Iran--for threatened and jailed bloggers. Throughout the past decade numerous well-known bloggers were imprisoned, sometimes without trial, and in many cases subjected to torture, for the crime of speaking out. Despite hopes that Mubarak's ouster would put a stop to restrictions on free expression, under military rule, the crackdown continues.

This is the third in our series (Part 1, Part 2) breaking down the potential effects of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an outrageous and grievously misguided bill now working its way through the House of Representatives. This post discusses dangerous software censorship provisions that are new in this bill, as well as the DNS censorship provisions it inherited from the Senate's COICA and PIPA bills. Please help us fight this misguided legislation by contacting Congress today.

Yesterday, EFF—along with the Cato Institute, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Public Knowledge, and TechFreedom—submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in FCC v. Fox, which asks the Court to declare unconstitutional the FCC’s heavy-handed and outdated indecency policy for broadcast TV. The policy stems from the 1978 Supreme Court decision in FCC v. Pacifica, also known as the “Seven Dirty Words” case. The Court held that broadcast media deserved lesser First Amendment protection than other mediums because it had a “uniquely pervasive presence in the lives of all Americans” and was “uniquely accessible to children.”